House hunting

When I moved to Edinburgh I got a furnished flat to live in. That basically means I've been living in a place where I worry about every spill on the rug and marks on the sofa. It's like being in a hotel room with no maid service. The main reason was that the boy wonder and I had a flat full of our own furniture in Manchester, the flat I was in was going to be temporary and as soon as I had a good job (TM) he would move north and we'd get a nice unfurnished place. That didn't go to plan. Firstly, Prudential Property Management, who had purchased the Manchester Arndale Centre from P&O Properties announced their plans for the redevelopment of the shopping centre about two weeks after I moved. Their plan involved knocking down one side of the Mall and rebuilding it in such a way that they could create a "high profile" store in that area. The plan also involved demolishing 60 apartments one of which I had a considerable stake in. It took three years to get a deal out of Prudential that didn't involve being screwed and believe me for a company who spend millions advertising themselves as a company who value communities they sure as hell tried to screw us and our neighbours.

< Biased opinion>Front page news - Prudential are just another bunch of lying, tight-arsed, money grabbing bastards. don't trust them to tell you the truth and don't trust them with with your hard earned cash< /Biased opinion>.

All the time this battle was going on the boy wonder was getting on well with his job so there was no immediate rush for him to move. He was looking for work here but not being in the area didn't help him.

Then we had all the upset of finding that my mother had lung cancer and the aggravation of my aunt hogging center stage as though she were the most important person in my mother's life and all the time trying to write me out of family history. Well given that her kids (my cousins) are a screwed up lazy jerk who spend more time with his mates than his wife and kid and a psychotic bitch who is only one step from the lunatic asylum, she's bound to have it in for anyone who is normal. She enlisted help from Ian the youngest of my uncles and they tried to take all sorts of moral high ground which I thought was prize especially as it was Ian's wife having an affair with my step-father that broke up my mother marriage.

After being taken completely out of the loop of the funeral arrangements, being told I couldn't speak with my step-father MKII and being physically threatened by Ian and getting verbal abuse from the psychotic bitch cousin, and seeing how boy wonder was standing by me I actually asked him to marry me. (It was more like "do you think we should get married?" I mean, hell, we'd been living together for 10 years at that point and separating would have been as painful as a divorce anyway).

Stay with me, this story does go somewhere. Eventually.

So moving on a year we got married. First day back at work after the honeymoon, he is taken to an office and told that he will resign, or else... The or else was a bit vague, in that it was we will put you through the disciplinary procedure and you don't have a chance, but no mention of what they would discipline him for and he couldn't think what in the hell he could possibly have done that would result in instant dismissal. On reflection we don't think there was anything that he had done but that the employers would have found something if he'd called their bluff. We decided not to do that as they were going to pay him his month's salary in lieu of notice (garden leave) and a nice hand out of three months salary tax free. So with no more ties to Manchester boy wonder moved up to Edinburgh. Into my furnished flat. With all our furniture from the place in Manchester!
To say that we are currently cramped is the understatement of the year. There is so much stuff in the flat that we have very little floor space to walk on and we have to negotiate passing places to move around the flat. It's like that game where you have to shift blocks around to make space to move other blocks. I'm not kidding.

So now that we are both working in nice well paid posts, we're looking for something else. Somewhere we don't have to worry if we get two visitors at the same time because we have space for the chairs. Somewhere we can actually have a dining table and not have to eat dinner from folding tv tables so that they can be stashed in a cupboard once we've finished using them.

We viewed a lovely flat on Friday and by the time I rang this morning to say we would take it we had beaten to the draw. Damn. There is another flat that we are interested in, but we aren't holding our breath, and we are going to look at some new build (yuck but needs must and all that) tomorrow.

Wish us luck